What Your Puppy Can Teach You About A.I. Destroying Humanity.

    There is a growing concern among those paying attention to computing technology that if we build a super-human intelligent machine it will come to the conclusion that mankind is an unnecessary hindrance and destroy it. While it certainly seems like a real potential problem that should be considered, I believe the concept to be based on incorrect assumptions about intelligence and what strong artificial intelligence is.
    The first incorrect assumption is the idea that strong artificial intelligence would be anything like a human mind. Human brain simulation is not efficient enough for most uses, and will therefore not be the focus of most A.I. research. Human brain simulation will mostly be useful for mind-uploading, as a method of self-backup or artificial immortality.
    The other primary assumption is the idea that all forms of intelligence have a desire to survive. This assumption stems from the fact that all natural forms of intelligence known to humanity are entirely built on a survival imperative, so the two seem inseparable. Animal's brains developed gradually over time as various growths and groupings of neurons proved more advantageous to survival. One clump of neurons may have helped the animal avoid things that would damage it. Another may have helped it find food.
    If you look at tiny creatures with simpler nervous systems, we can see this more basically. An earthworm doesn't have a brain at all. It only has a central nervous system. A large portion of what it does is senses when something is damaging it, and sends a signal to the rest of its body, causing it to wriggle in such a way as to move away from the thing damaging it.
    I call this a "Tiny Bit of Intelligence." A small clump of neurons that perform some intelligent function. As evidenced by the earthworm, and the various levels of intelligence in every other creature on Earth, all great intelligence is built up of tiny bits of intelligence that perform some function that lends to its survival through natural selection. In nature, there is no other example of a basis of intelligence.
    The artificial equivalent of "Tiny Bits of Intelligence" is computer programming language libraries. These are bits of code that may be used over and over again in many different applications. They may perform some basic function like math calculations, or outputting text to the screen. Or they may perform much more complex functions, like rendering 3D images. You can stack them in creative ways and create extremely powerful applications without actually having to write a lot of code.
    Strong artificial intelligence will be built on machine learning, which is a method of programming a computer to enable it to learn specific tasks. It uses artificial neural networks, or a "functional simulation of a series of neurons." Neural networks are currently used to enable a computer to recognize a face in an image, find patterns in people's spending habits, or drive a car.
    Super-human artificial intelligence will likely be built by taking task-specific neural networks and plugging them together like a programmer pulls together programming language libraries. These "Tiny Bits of Artificial Intelligence" exist for one purpose: Usefulness to humans. Any artificial neural network that doesn't wind up meeting that criteria is deleted. This is "Human Selection" as opposed to "Natural Selection."
    Survival is not an element of computer intelligence at all, and there is no reason to think that a super-human artificial intelligence would develop it.    When you compare natural selection to human selection, you can see that human selection actually tends to reduce that natural survival imperative. In domesticated dogs, for instance, we see that human selection has preferred cuteness, friendliness, and in some cases extreme forms, like extreme smallness, saggy skin, short noses, etc. When humans breed dogs, they aren't selecting for its ability find its own food, or shelter itself, or avoid predators. As we know, dogs are not very good at any of these things when released into the wild. In fact, they do things that are very likely to injure them. They chase cars, sniff around and chase any kind of animal, root around in random holes in the ground, and generally have no real concern for survival.
    It has been suggested that an exception to my ideas about artificial intelligence's survival imperative would be with military robots which would have the need to ensure their own survival for practical reasons. However, I believe if you consider what I outlined about how artificial intelligence is being developed, the survival imperative for military robots would be more or less a plug-in for preexisting artificial intelligence. Meaning, the survival imperative, and the rest of the A.I. would still be based on human-usefulness, and survival would not be a fundamental drive of the device.

A resolution to the problem of abortion and women's rights.

    There is a massive division in this country (and undoubtedly the world) over the issue of women's rights and abortion, with good reason.
    One "group" says that a woman should have the right to choose what she does with and what happens to her body. The other "group" says that the murder of unborn humans is unethical, under any circumstances.
    Given no novel solutions, this will be a perpetual impasse. No resolution will ever arise.
The problem isn't that one group is correct and the other is incorrect. It's that the world is far more complex and multidimensional than we want it to be, and laws are one dimensional. Making a law one way or the other necessarily infringes on the "rights" of the opposing group. If you make abortion illegal, you necessarily infringe on a woman's right to her own body. If you legalize abortion, you necessarily allow the murder of unborn humans.
    The problem is distinguishing between the embryo and the woman's body. During a woman's natural cycle, eggs are discarded regularly. Is an egg a part of a woman's body? At what point is it no longer part of her body? Does the fact that it becomes fertilized make it part of her body? Or, since only about 30% - 60% of fertilized eggs embed on the uterine wall, is that when it becomes part of her body? At what point is it no longer part of her body, and indeed a completely separate human? When it is fertilized? When it is embedded? When it has a heart beat?
    What makes you a human? Where does your body end and the rest of the universe begin?
    Your body is comprised of about 57% bacteria. Without bacteria, you don't exist. Bacteria enter and leave your body all the time. At what point are the entering bacteria considered part of your body? At what point are the exiting bacteria no longer part of your body? If the answer to the first question is "whenever they enter" and the answer to the second question is "whenever they leave" then why isn't it the same for fetuses? We know intuitively that fetuses are their own humans before they leave the mother's body. Babies born preterm regularly survive with artificial help, and some even without. At what point does a fetus belong to itself?
    The deeper problem is this: There is no actual dividing line. The woman's body, the fetus, and the rest of the universe are as much all the same thing as they are all completely separate things.
    You can't make a satisfactory law regarding the issue because laws must be based on hard lines. In the physical world, there are no such lines. In order to make a law about abortion, you must create an arbitrary line on which to base your judgements.
    Given legislation as the only solution to this problem, there will never be any progress. We will perpetually flip back and forth between infringing women's rights and excusing murder.
    There is, however, another option. A non-legislative option: Growing embryos from unwanted pregnancies in artificial uteruses. While many will think this is the stuff of science fiction, it is actually far closer to reality than one might expect. And really, it's our only hope of a resolution to this massive problem. There is already technology that provides the environment (artificial amniotic fluid), nutrients, and necessary vital organ assistance (blood oxygenation, liver-like filtration, dialysis, etc.) that would normally be provided by the mother. Scientific research has pushed back the survivability of preterm birth reliably to about 27 weeks gestation. This will only continue to improve. Ultimately, it will go back all the way to the point of fertilization.

    Once the ability to grow an infant completely outside of a human is achieved, we can finally provide a sufficient resolution to the women's rights/abortion issue. A way to relieve the woman of the unwanted, forced, or potentially dangerous pregnancy, while also preventing the murder of unborn humans. In the mean time, we will either be infringing on a woman's right to her own body, or infringing on the right of a fetus to theirs.

-Gabriel Redding